Transgender African-Americans’ Open Wound: ‘We’re Considered a Joke’

When Elle Hearns watched the video clip someone had sent to her on social media, it really stung.

It featured a black comedian, Lil Duval, on “The Breakfast Club,” a popular New York City-based morning radio show that caters to an African-American audience, joking that if a sexual partner turned out to be a transgender woman, he would want to kill her if she hadn’t told him beforehand.

Ms. Hearns is a black transgender woman who has devoted much of her life over the past few years to defending black people — mostly men — from the harassment, brutality and killings they face at the hands of the police. Yet here was a black man, interviewed by three black hosts, lobbing what Ms. Hearns felt was “an attack on the entire community.”

“I was ashamed, I was embarrassed, I was angry,” she said.

At the heart of Ms. Hearns’s pain is a betrayal that black transgender people say has long afflicted them.

With few exceptions, black transgender women and men say that they get more hatred from black people than anyone else, even though they have been on the front lines protesting issues that affect all African-Americans.

“I feel like we have been at the forefront with so many people fighting, and now that it’s time for people to be joining in our fight, no one’s there,” said Atlantis Narcisse, 45, the founder of Save Our Sisters, a support organization for black transgender women in Houston. “They will stand up for a drug dealer being killed or a black man being beaten, but won’t stand up for black trans women being murdered.”

Ms. Narcisse, a black transgender woman, said that she has received more support from whites, and that she is on edge around African-Americans because she does not think they will stand with her if she is attacked.

“We’re considered a joke,” she said. “They still look at us as men dressing up, playing in women’s clothes, which is not the case.”

Many black people’s views on transgender people come in part from the central role that religion and the church play in black life, several transgender people said. It also stems from an emphasis on hypermasculinity in black culture, which has deep roots in black men having to use physical strength to survive generations of oppression, they said.

“To be seen as feminine if you’re seen as a black male is a sign of weakness,” said Kiara St. James, the director of the New York Transgender Advocacy Group.

That attitude could mean grim consequences for black transgender people.

Some black men who knowingly engage in relationships with transgender women might become ashamed when others find out, turning violent against their partners, advocates said. Ms. St. James recalled being sexually assaulted in the streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, by an acquaintance. When she asked passers-by for help, her attacker told them that she was transgender, and the would-be helpers instead mocked her.

Although the raw numbers are small, estimates suggest that transgender people are killed at a much higher rate than the general population. While the chance of a young adult being murdered is 1 in 12,000, that probability increases to 1 in 2,600 for young, black transgender women, according to an analysis by the news organization Mic. At least 111 people who were transgender or did not identify with a gender were killed between 2010 and 2016, the report said, with nearly three in four of them being black women or people who presented as feminine.

Lil Duval’s comments on the radio show, which aired on July 28, spoke to these grim statistics. The morning show on Power 105.1 — featuring the hosts DJ Envy, Angela Yee and Charlamagne Tha God — is known for its edgy interviews with celebrities, who have ranged from rappers to Hillary Clinton, who went on the show just weeks before last year’s election.

The controversy with the Duval interview started when one of the hosts asked him what he thought of President Trump’s proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military. When he joked that transgender women were actually men, the hosts laughed along, but they quickly corrected him when he referred to transgender people using a derogatory term. But when DJ Envy asked Lil Duval what he would do if a woman he had sex with later said she was transgender, he responded, “This might sound messed up and I don’t care: She dying.”

The hosts quickly told him that killing a transgender person was a hate crime and that he could not do that. But Lil Duval continued to make jokes and said it was about manipulation and taking away his choice.

Charlamagne Tha God, the show’s most popular host, agreed with that point, saying that by not disclosing she is transgender, a woman is “taking away a person’s power of choice,” and he added that “you should go to jail or something.”

In a statement to The New York Times released through his publicist on Saturday, Charlamagne Tha God denounced all prejudice and hate crimes, emphasizing that he wholeheartedly believed that violence against transgender people was wrong.

“Nobody should be killed just for existing,” he said.

What needed to be discussed further, he added, was whether transgender people should disclose their gender identities to sexual partners.

“To me, anytime you take away someone’s power of choice, it’s criminal,” he said. “Let me decide for myself if this is what I want. But if a trans person doesn’t disclose until after sexual acts have occurred, they shouldn’t be killed for it.”

The comments on the show would have been more upsetting if they hadn’t been so predictable, Ms. Narcisse said.

“That’s what black people are taught to think about us — that we’re tricking people,” Ms. Narcisse said. “How can I get mad at a message that’s been grounded into a community for years?”

In the aftermath of the show, Ms. Hearns spent hours discussing how to respond with organizers with the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, an organization she is starting to advocate for black transgender women. They circulated a petition calling upon the radio station and its parent company, iHeartMedia, to remove “The Breakfast Club” from the air.

“I think the only way to move forward with the protection of underrepresented communities is to really push back and fight back against the cultural norms,” Ms. Hearns said.

In response to the show, Ashlee Marie Preston, a black transgender woman, interrupted Charlamagne Tha God while he spoke at an event last week. The backlash she drew for her protest, Ms. Preston said, was indicative of the harsh stigma toward transgender people she sees in black communities.

While she said she has received a lot of positive comments from black people on social media, Ms. Preston, the editor in chief of the feminist magazine Wear Your Voice, also got plenty of hate messages. One person said that transgender people were “getting out of hand.” Others were angry that they were criticizing a black show and defended Lil Duval as just sharing his opinion.

The worst thing about the discussion on the radio, Ms. Preston said, was that it painted black transgender women as scheming and assigned all the blame to them.

“It’s the same antiquated rhetoric that law enforcement uses when they justify shooting African-Americans during routine traffic stops,” she said. “The idea is that if someone kills a trans person, she must have done something. She must have been guilty of doing someone some sort of harm.”

Follow John Eligon on Twitter @jeligon

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: An Open Wound for Transgender African-Americans: ‘We’re Considered a Joke’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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